Why Unicredit has snubbed Mps
What will happen to Mps now? The comment by Mario Seminerio, editor of the Phastidio blog
In a country that makes conspiracy and narratives its stylistic code, we did not take long to read alternative explanations on the collapse of the negotiation to marry a part of Banca MPS with Unicredit. We wonder, for example, if the CEO of Unicredit, Andrea Orcel, has never actually intended to take this portion of the bank home, and has continually raised the mail to be told no.
Or if the actual conditions of the Sienese bank are actually worse than assumed; a sort of surprise so recurrent that it is no longer such. After all, NPL valuation is an art rather than a science . Some will say that Orcel's demands were surreal: not just capital neutrality but even profit growth. Many of us would comment that they are all good at being Cristiano Ronaldo, when the opposing team is not even on the pitch.
OPERATION "TROUBLE TO THE WINNERS"
But we must not forget a central point to the whole affair: Orcel attempted to repeat the "woe to the vanquished" operation, with which Intesa Sanpaolo got the Italian taxpayers to finance the purchase of the healthy part of the two Venetian popular collapses precisely because the counterparty has almost non-existent negotiating levers. And those few at its disposal are amputated by the conditions imposed by politics.
In the case of MPS, somewhat surreal: the historicity of the brand, reminiscent of the national-popular psychodrama over that of Alitalia; or the essential "knowledge of the territory", without which, it seems to be understood, whole portions of our country would be desertified and starved for lack of credit.
To update the story, we now need to keep a bank under public control to make it synergistic with the PNRR disbursements. Which, according to politics, should send a shiver down the spine of taxpayers.
“MORE TIME IS NEEDED”, ITALIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM
What will happen now? I imagine the request to the EU Commission for "more time", which should be the text of the new Italian national anthem. Because this town never has enough time, like Bertoldo who couldn't find the tree to hang himself on. The Treasury could attempt full nationalization by invoking the second precautionary recapitalization in a five-year period, given that the adverse scenario of the European stress tests showed an incinerated supervisory capital. In that case, however, the so-called burden sharing would be triggered , that is the cancellation of the subordinated bonds of MPS, and there would be new waves of patriotic outrage.
We will come back to read about unlikely comparisons with German banks and plots against us and our prodigious economic fabric. Plots of evident self-inflicted but transeat matrix. We have an incredible ability to inflate buboes up to risk sepsis of the whole organism, we could not escape this umpteenth opportunity.
What better occasion to show that Italy is starting up again? From your own tics, for sure.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/unicredit-mps-cosa-succede/ on Sun, 31 Oct 2021 16:00:18 +0000.